FatFrame

As written in two older post, (before I got lazy and let the site compile my tweets and post them every week automatically) I was looking into the idea of building a dedicated SmoothWall firewall as a fun geek project.

After these posts, the idea evolved into many different solutions and builds and I was finally able to settle on making a purchase this week. The company that manufactures the board and enclosure (PC Engines) is located in China, however I decided to purchase the parts from a manufacturer (NetGate) in the US for shipping reasons. It was slightly more expensive this way, but all in all the parts came to just under $200. Not to shabby considering the features included in m0n0wall, which is the software/OS I finally settled on running since it is much more feature rich than SmoothWall. Even my $600 Cisco Router couldn’t do some of the things m0n0wall can.

Parts list:
ALIX.2D3+B System Board: (3/1/256/LX800) with battery
ALIX.2D3 3 LAN Indoor Enclosure Blue with USB & ANT
AC/DC 18V 0.825A 15W Switching Adapter only
SMA Dust Cap / Rubber Antenna Hole Plug (Since I am not adding a wireless card… yet anyways)

That’s about it. No need to buy RAM or a CPU separately, everything is contained on one board. There are also some optional expansion cards that can be purchased fairly cheaply for this board as well. For example, wireless cards, and even a crypto accelerator to offload VPN encryption from the CPU.

Once I finally figured out how to console in to the unit using a null modem cable (notice that there is not monitor port, just a serial), it was pretty straight forward. There was one odd thing I noticed, however. When initially starting the unit you need to use a baud rate of 38400 in Putty. Once m0n0wall is started you have to use the default of 9600. I am unsure why this is, but there is very little configuration you need to do this way. Most configuration will occur via the web interface.

Not too much to it, much simpler than the original. Here are some pictures from after I had the board mounted. Feel free to leave a comment with any questions.

The official wordpress app is finally available for Android! Posting this from my Motorola Droid. =D

Did a little spring cleaning on the site and added/scrapped some features. RSS Syndication is gone…. at least for now, and you also notice some spiffy new Twitter integration. If things work correctly, you should have discovered this update from a Facebook/Twitter update that is automatically kicked off whenever I update the blog. Something you might be interested in @thomasblade. All of my tweets will also be compiled and posted automatically every Sunday at 12pm. Oh, and yet another theme change since my old one had horrible widget support.

On the server side, new versions of MySQL and PHP…. just because. 5 hours later the site is up again. Backups are your friend.

Plugins:
WP-Cache – For when @thomasblade decides to DOS my site
WordPress Backup – Weekly database backups? In my Email Inbox? It’s more likely than you think…
Twitter Tools – Twitter integration
Akismet – Spam control

Theme:
Elegant Grunge – This will likely change to something else because I cannot seem to decide on a theme

The public beta of Windows 7 is out tomorrow! Be sure to sign up and download your copy here!

I decided to scrap the idea of setting up a dedicated hardware server to host my installation of SmoothWall. Instead I upgraded the RAM in my server from 512mb (heh, ouch) to 2gigs. Then I installed the new VMware Server application and things seem to be running pretty smoothly considering that my server is well over 5 years old and was never that powerful to begin with.

All there is left to do is hammer out the virtual networking kinks. I also added two more nic card, bringing my total up to three. I still need to figure out how to correctly set up the extra interfaces, so this brings an extra chanllenge to the mix, but will be worth it when all is said and done.

Another outcome of the virtualization solution, I have now set up a Nagios server running on Fedora 10. Now all there is left to do is get notifications working and set up some monitoring on my network. Maybe even posting Nagios notifications to Twitter, just because I can. =D

As always, stay tuned for updates…

I’ve been playing around with SmoothWall for some time now, and even though I’ve been sitting behind a nice Cisco IOS based firewall I thought it would be cool to get a small perimeter network up and running. I was bored one day and in need of a new project, so I decided that it would be interesting to use a mini pc solution to make a dedicated hardware firewall.

I checked some prices on Newegg, as well as some other websites for the hardware and realized that I could build a dedicated system running SmoothWall Express easily for around $200. I am still ironing out the final hardware decisions, but this is what I have decided on at this point:

Apex Case w/250 watt PSU
Mini-ITX Motherboard with AMD Geode CPU
3port Gigabit LAN Daughter Card
1gig of DDR 333 RAM

These components, as well as a few other miscellaneous parts add up to $256.93 before tax and shipping. Once I have the details ironed out and decide for sure on what components to use, I am definitely going to consider making this purchase.

More details to come…

I have always struggled to get wireless to work under my favorite Linux distro, Fedora. I recently switched to Ubuntu just because wireless networking pretty much works out of the box. The only work required is enabling the restricted device driver.

Since the release of the partially open source Broadcom wireless drivers I have been debating trying to get the wireless NIC in my Dell Latitude D620 to work under Fedora 9, (the current release at this time).

After doing a quick Google search, I came across this blog.

I still ran into some minor issues, but was finally able to get wireless to work successfully. It turns out that from a default installation of Fedora, you need to install the kernel development package to get the driver package to make. The only modification I made was adding the “kernel-devel” package to the yum install in step one. One other note… The current driver does not seem to like wireless networks with their SSID broadcasts turned off. Not a big deal considering that SSID broadcasting is usually turned on and I am sure the driver will be fixed with a future release.

It also seems that there is an RPM available to make the install even easier. Here is the excerpt from the blog:

“Update 8 November 2008: Just a note to mention that I’ve packaged this up into an RPM and so this driver will shortly be available as an RPM in the rpmfusion repos for Fedora 8, 9 and 10.

It is already in “rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing” for Fedora 8 and 9 releases. If you have that repo enabled just do a “yum install wl-kmod” to install this driver.”

Thank you cenolan.com! You have certainly done your part in helping solve this headache!

I have always had an interest in programming and I found this site quite entertaining. At the time of this post it has 366 different programs written that simply display the text, “Hello World!” If you have ever looked into programming and read a starter guide, there is a good chance that the first program your write will do exactly this.

This site has images of how processors have evolved over time and thus proving Moore’s Law. It is quite impressive how something like to processor can evolve in such a short time span. Check it out.

Found this link on Hackaday.com The person who built the system was apparently doing a lot of video rendering and was tired of jobs taking all night to complete. So after building this system out of an Ikea cabinet he was able to do the jobs in about ten minutes. Check it out…